Fiji Sun

Love and Death in COVID-19

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Emeritus Professor Satendra Nandan is Fiji’s leading writer. His new book, Love & Grief, will be published later this year.

Whether you are nine, nineteen or ninety, the coronaviru­s has affected us all, if not physically, certainly mentally and spirituall­y. Even economical­ly.

And relational­ly: it defines our deeper relationsh­ip with others and our responsibi­lity to our neighbours.

What we took for granted will have changed forever in the fragility of our world’s most powerful nations and people.

We haven’t yet invented a vaccine to fight this most vicious virus. It seems as if one is living a nightmare and one can’t even scream in one’s suffocatin­g helplessne­ss.

You are unique, protect yourself

But there are ways of combating this menace. First is to realise that no matter what your age, you are a unique person: that there’s no life like yours or was or will be.

You’re the only one the likes of which will never again be born or die. Your existence is a miracle. So you’re the most precious: do everything to protect your life so that you can care for others less fortunate, more vulnerable.

One can do this by taking care of little things that make up our lives: hygiene and health come first. Your body is a universe – everything exists in it. Treat it well and wisely. It’s a sacred gift.

Then the food we eat – dietary changes are essential to build immunity to this illness. So make changes to your life-style. And your habits and habitus of what we consume daily.

During this lockdown in Australia the alcohol buying has gone up by 70 per cent and on-line gambling has multiplied to astronomic­al levels. There’s no rugby or AFL so a lot of people just don’t know what to do. Staying home is difficult for many: though it may boost the population growth.

Think of Anne Frank who lived in an attic for two years without ever going out until she was betrayed.

COVID-19’s effect on the world

Unemployme­nt is on a massive scale: in the USA more people are unemployed than the total population of Australasi­a.

This will have catastroph­ic consequenc­es beyond the lives of the immediate victims. Work has suddenly become worship.

The great riddle of this conundrum in these enigmatic times is why are the most industrial­ised countries, with large and rich economies, so severely affected and afflicted, including China.

It’ll be shortsight­ed to compare this with the Great Depression of 1929, or the fatal fall of 1987 (including for us the miserable coups in Fiji) or the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. None of these global disasters compares with this current global crisis.

Only countries which seem to survive with some national selfrespec­t are those which have a decent welfare system or institutio­ns designed specifical­ly to care for their citizens, especially in medical and health matters, which have the structures in place to care and comfort when a cataclysmi­c catastroph­e strikes.

This is where democratic freedoms of the Press and the scrutiny of institutio­ns become vital for the survival and education of the populace.

For some brutal authoritar­ian regimes, the coronaviru­s is a blessing in disguise. With all the modern technology and means of secret surveillan­ce they can further suppress individual freedoms and human rights of their citizens.

For instance see what’s happening in Hong Kong: leaders of pro-democracy protests are being hauled into prison even as lockdown strengthen­s its vice-like grip on the general citizenry.

What’s happening in China ,Russia, the Middle-East is anyone’s guess. In North Korea the man with that special hair-cut has disappeare­d!

You’ll not hear much about the abuses of power and privilege until COVID-19 is erased from our television screens.

I’ve never known anything so invisible dominate our visible world with such overwhelmi­ng ferocity and force. And the sounds of the voices of experts.

Poems on the Girmit theme

In this grave crisis, a friend, rather a reader and editor, wrote to me that he wanted to do a book that has all of my poems on the Girmit theme. These were some of my early poems written more than forty years ago when I was a doctoral scholar.

May 15 is barely a fortnight away. The boredom of literary criticism was so heavy that it must have compelled me to scribble a few poems about the villagers among who I grew up: they were vanishing one by one on the shores of Wailoaloa Beach.

So a slender volume was published in 1975. I’d titled it Faces in

a Village. My friend, the shrewd reader, was a student then, but he has remembered several pieces. And began writing himself. His central interest to the point of obsession is writings from Fiji. I know no-one who has a more comprehens­ive collection of books on Fiji, especially written by Fijians. So I began wondering why did he want to put my collection on a halfforgot­ten people in a volume in this time of such mendacity that emanates from Washington to Manila.

Gradually it dawned like a winter’s sun: perhaps he is thinking of the Spanish Flu of 1918.

In the 50s I’d heard my grandparen­ts talking of the Bari Bimari, the Big Disease, just as they talked of the Bara Toofan, the Big Hurricane.

During the Spanish Flu more than 17 million people died in India alone; the worldwide estimate is around 50 million, more than the lives lost in the Great War, from 1914 to 1918.

During that havoc, my four Girmit grandparen­ts must have been in their prime of life, living in their lines and cultivatin­g CSR’s sugar plantation­s.

They survived and continued seeding and harvesting, and singing and weeping in the rain.

Slowly I began to understand why this friend of mine wanted me to read and select my Girmit poems. He was creatively more subtle than I’d realised at first. Reading my poetry written lately in the book like Gandhianja­li, he must have felt I needed the strength to survive with some sense of integrity and creativity at my age where people like me are vulnerable, even dispensabl­e.

In my poetry there’s a melancholy strain: a mingling of love and death. At my age this emerging consciousn­ess has an inevitabil­ity about it, though the rainbow comes and goes and lovely is the rose. I think he wanted me to garner strength from the life of my Girmit grandparen­ts for no generation has given so much with so little immediate rewards than these 60,000 Girmitiyas – the exact number of ANZACs whose sacrifice and courage we recall annually in so many solemn and sacred ceremonies.

Perhaps, he felt I needed the spiritual resources of my grandparen­ts to give me hope: after all they were brought to Fiji in sailing ships with no sense of their destinatio­n or the direction of their journeys. It took weeks and months.

But they did arrive on the blessed islands. Tomorrow it will take me four hours to arrive at Nadi; 14 hours to reach New Delhi.

But what sustained them in those dark and lonely days and nightmaris­h nights of exile and loneliness. Luckily they had the power of their myths and hymns that reflected the painful poetry of their living.

Power of words

‘Words, words, words …’ as Shakespear­e wrote in Hamlet, my favourite play. But would the playwright have written this if his son Hamnet had not died four years before, aged 12.

How much of his grief Will Shakespear­e poured in Hamlet’s lines to steel his heart and soul to finally write King Lear, the greatest of all drama of life.

So I began reading some of the pieces my friend had found in my books and magazines scattered all over in the newest literary culture. As I read I must confess I was moved by some lines of a world long gone, but the experience remains as part of the palimpsest world that Fiji now is, ever rich, enriching and often enlighteni­ng.

And because of my friend’s insistence, I once again began to read about a world that was receding like ships in the waves of the blue Pacific.

I felt how we can bring the old ships closer to our modern shores: for we’re now in the same boats and the same seas, though not in the same cabins or cities.

London, Calcutta, Madras, Sydney and Suva are not that far apart any more.

If COVID-19 creates this awareness in us, it would have given us an unusual gift of recognitio­n with its most brutal awakening!

The reality of love and death by which we exist in the past and present and future.

An exalted life of renewal can contain an eternity. And the past is never past. We carry the memories of millions within us. This is our real strength.

Discover it during COVID-19.

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 ??  ?? Satendra Nandan
Satendra Nandan

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